Someday I’ll wake up.

There’s something about North America that doesn’t seem real. It’s not just Los Angeles and the fake tits, the ass implants, the botox heads. It’s everywhere. Especially the west coast, where buildings are made of wood and plastic, seemingly as permanent as the forts and huts we made as kids. Though maybe not as grand as those castles we fought for.

You miss it, the stone and brick, the old buildings, the old roads, the narrow winding streets. You can spot it a mile off, a building designed exactly for a purpose, function is something I can appreciate, but I miss the permanence. Reuse and oddness makes character. You can pass a building and know straight away, with no signs, that it was a McDonald’s. Maybe years ago but it’s still a pile of wood and plastic that was built just for this. When Burger King take over they’ll knock it and build one of their own

Not like Europe where what was once a grand house is now sixteen flats, a tenement is now a restaurant. No clear lines from the kitchen, the waitress struggles trays of food up narrow back stairs to small ill-shaped rooms.

The almost temporary buildings here are remind you of a movie back lot, just a facade painted to look real.

In LA it’s worse. There’s no real weather, just sun and warm or hot or very hot. No snow, feck all rain. Listening to the Ben Folds sing of “The smell of cold, Car seat is freezing” songs about the weather and they seem real. Not where I am. No, it’s all not quite real. It’s all just fake,

Someday I’ll wake up. In the rain and the cold in a damp room that was built a few hundred years and a few dozen purposes ago. And LA and all of North America will slip away, half remembered like another nameless movie I saw last month.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.